This bilingual blog - 'आन्याची फाटकी पासोडी' in Marathi- is largely a celebration of visual and/or comic ...तुकाराम: "ढेकणासी बाज गड,उतरचढ केवढी" (Tukaram: For a bedbug a bed is like a castle. so much climbing up and down!)... George Santayana: " Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence"...William Hazlitt: "Pictures are scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

H. P. Lovecraft: "What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything!"

John Gray: "Unlike Schopenhauer, who lamented the human lot, Leopardi believed that the best response to life is laughter. What fascinated Schopenhauer, along with many later writers, was Leopardi’s insistence that illusion is necessary to human happiness."

Justin E.H. Smith: “One should of course take seriously serious efforts to improve society. But when these efforts fail, in whole or in part, it is only humor that offers redemption. So far, human expectations have always been strained, and have always come, give or take a bit, to nothing. In this respect reality itself has the form of a joke, and humor the force of truth.”

Sunday, June 30, 2013

Is Sulochana Singing to Singer?...सर्वभार घेतला असा समर्थ खांब तू

Leon Wieseltier, New Republic, May 28 2013:

"For decades now in America we have been witnessing a steady
and sickening denigration of humanistic understanding and humanistic method. We
live in a society inebriated by technology, and happily, even giddily governed
by the values of utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience. The technological
mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer
practical questions to questions of meaning – to ask of things not if they are
true or false, or good or evil, but how they work..."

Martin Wolf, Financial Times, October 2 2012:

"The speed of travel went from the horse to the jet plane. Then, some fifty
years ago, it stuck. Urbanisation is a one-off. So, too, is the collapse in
child mortality and the tripling of life expectancy. So, too, is control over
domestic temperatures. So, too, is liberation of women from domestic drudgery.

By such standards, today’s information age is full of sound and fury signifying
little. Many of the labour-saving benefits of computers occurred decades ago.
There was an upsurge in productivity growth in the 1990s. But the effect
petered out.

In the 2000s, the impact of the information revolution has come largely via
enthralling entertainment and communication devices. How important is this?
Prof Gordon proposes a thought-experiment. You may keep either the brilliant
devices invented since 2002 or running water and inside lavatories. I will
throw in Facebook. Does that make you change your mind? I thought not. I would
not keep everything invented since 1970 if the alternative were losing running
water.

What we are now living through is an intense, but narrow, set of innovations
in one important area of technology. Does it matter? Yes. We can, after all,
see that a decade or two from now every human being will have access to all of
the world’s information. But the view that overall innovation is now slower
than a century ago is compelling."

My in-laws have a sewing machine. Once almost every middle-class home I knew at Miraj used to have one.

I liked the sound it made.

Our
home at Miraj, just like cooking gas, never had any. I don't remember
seeing my mother even using it. I always wanted us to get one.

Our neighbours at Miraj used to sell a brand of sewing machines at Sangli. I think they became prosperous in the process.

When my aunt Kumud-mavashi
(कुमुद-मावशी) was widowed for the second time in 1971, one of the
suggestions I heard was to 'empower' her with a sewing machine.

Not just homes but almost every movie- Hindi or Marathi used to have one. Poor mothers- especially widows- brought up our heroes or heroines stitching clothes.

Just like NREGA today for rural poor, sewing machine once was thought to be a panacea for middle-class 'poverty'.

So far I have been talking about the 1960's and 1970's. But I did not know the status of sewing machine in 19th century.

"The sewing
machine was the smartphone of the nineteenth century. Just skim through the
promotional materials of the leading sewing-machine manufacturers of that distant
era and you will notice the many similarities with our own lofty, dizzy
discourse. The catalog from Willcox & Gibbs, the Apple of its day, in 1864,
includes glowing testimonials from a number of reverends thrilled by the
civilizing powers of the new machine. One calls it a “Christian institution”;
another celebrates its usefulness in his missionary efforts in Syria; a third,
after praising it as an “honest machine,” expresses his hope that “every man
and woman who owns one will take pattern from it, in principle and duty.” The
brochure from Singer in 1880—modestly titled “Genius Rewarded: or, the Story of
the Sewing Machine”—takes such rhetoric even further, presenting the sewing
machine as the ultimate platform for spreading American culture. The machine’s
appeal is universal and its impact is revolutionary..."

Christian institution?

If
only, in the then India, Jansangh had little more weight...imagine
'Hindu institution'...the ultimate platform for spreading Indian
culture...Rathyatra with a sewing machine mounted atop!

courtesy: Wikimedia and the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division

Evgeny Morozov continues:

"Even its marketing is pure
poetry:

On every sea
are floating the Singer Machines; along every road pressed by the foot of
civilized man this tireless ally of the world’s great sisterhood is going upon
its errand of helpfulness. Its cheering tune is understood no less by the
sturdy German matron than by the slender Japanese maiden; it sings as
intelligibly to the flaxen-haired Russian peasant girl as to the dark-eyed
Mexican Señorita. It needs no interpreter, whether it sings amidst the snows of
Canada or upon the pampas of Paraguay; the Hindoo mother and the Chicago maiden
are to-night making the self-same stitch; the untiring feet of Ireland’s
fair-skinned Nora are driving the same treadle with the tiny understandings of
China’s tawny daughter; and thus American machines, American brains, and
American money are bringing the women of the whole world into one universal
kinship and sisterhood."

Matching that poetry and sisterhood is the following image:

Indian actor Sulochana (सुलोचना) playing widow, operating 'Singer' and 'singing' a lovely melodious song written by G D Madgulkar composed by Sudhir Phadke using voice of playback singer Suman Kalyanpur in a Marathi film "Ektee" (एकटी), 1968

There is a line in the song: 'सर्वभार घेतला असा समर्थ खांब तू' (You are the capable pillar that endures all the pressure.)....Is she singing to Singer?

In 19th century India and earlier, women sang as they sat at the grinding stone. When used in 20th century around me, I liked the sound it made. Here is that machine:

Image courtesy: www.manipal.net

Evgeny Morozov:

"...And what of
the almighty sewing machine? That great beacon of hope—described as “America’s
Chief Contribution to Civilization” in Singer’s catalog from 1915—did not
achieve its cosmopolitan mission. (How little has changed: a few years ago, one
of Twitter’s co-founders described his company as a “triumph of humanity.”) In
1989 the Singer company, in a deeply humiliating surrender to the forces of
globalization, was sold off to a company owned by a Shanghai-born Canadian that
went bankrupt a decade later. American machines, American brains, and American
money were no longer American. One day Google, too, will fall. The good news is
that, thanks in part to this superficial and megalomaniacal book, the company’s
mammoth intellectual ambitions will be preserved for posterity to study in a
cautionary way. The virtual world of Google’s imagination might not be real,
but the glib arrogance of its executives definitely is."

Pages

Will Self: “To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail – the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short. It is this failure – a ceaseless threnody keening through the writing mind – that dominates my working life, just as an overweening sense of not having loved with enough depth or recklessness or tenderness dominates my personal one.” John Berger: “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” Ezra Pound: "Make it new"...Mark Twain: "Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that “plagiarism” farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance except plagiarism!... For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.”… John Crowley: "Meanwhile the real world then, no matter what, will be as racked with pain and insufficiency as any human world at any time. It just won’t be racked by the same old pains and insufficiencies; it will be strange. It is forever unknowably strange, its strangeness not the strangeness of fiction or of any art or any guess but absolute. That’s its nature."...Alexander Waugh: "Beware of seriousness: it is a form of stupidity"...Charles Simic: "There is a wonderful moment when we realize that the picture we’ve been looking at for a long time has become a part of us as much as some childhood memory or some dream we once had. The attentive eye makes the world interesting. A good photograph, like a good poem, is a self-contained little universe inexhaustible to scrutiny." ... Hilary Mantel: “It’s for Shakespeare to penetrate the heart of a prince, and for me to study his cuff buttons.”… Ingmar Bergman: "It is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life"... Graham Greene: "Kim Philby betrayed his country-yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?"... Friedrich Schlegel: "Hercules…labored too…But the goal of his career was really always a sublime leisure, and for that reason he became one of the Olympians. Not so this Prometheus, the inventor of education and enlightenment…Because he seduced mankind into working, [he] now has to work himself, whether he wants to or not"... Walt Whitman: “Do I repeat myself? Very well then, I repeat myself.”...W H Auden: "…though one cannot always/ Remember exactly why one has been happy,/ There is no forgetting that one was"...Walter de la Mare: "No, No, Why further should we roam / Since every road man Journeys by, / Ends on a hillside far from Home / Under an alien sky"...Franz Kafka: “You can hold back from the suffering of the world. You have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.”..."Over these unremembered marble columns, / birds glide their old remembered way. / Dive in red gold setting tide and write dark alphabets on evening sky /whether an epitaph, chorus or strange augury / little man you only hope to know!"